In this article, Cois Coiribe catches up with Interdisciplinary Physics Professor Aaron Golden, Director of the Centre for Astronomy here at University of Galway. We explore the versatility of physics, ranging from studying the vast unknown of galaxies and star systems to understanding the complex interactions of medical treatments. As we find out, creative problem-solving applies to both, with there being more in common between stars and the clinic than you might think.
Your career spans both astronomy and clinical genomics. How does that journey reflect the interdisciplinary culture and research opportunities at University of Galway?
This University has always had a strong sense of collegiality. In Ireland, people like to talk of course, there’s a sheer joy in communicating. Here that joy feeds into the opportunities that crop up serendipitously – being able to talk to someone, for example, who’s working across the road in the hospital, through the connections we have through jointly teaching our MSc in Medical Physics. I might hear that person describe a problem that, from a physicist’s point of view, I’ve come across before. It may sound a little crazy but it’s actually an easy jump for me to go from studying the Crab Nebula using a high-speed camera to analysing a patient’s genome or MRI dataset. It’s the same fundamental type of data problem, where the data follows the rules. Once you figure out the rules, you can understand the problem and come up with a better idea of what’s actually happening.
Physicists are trained to get to the heart of a problem and ask: How can I conceptualise and solve this problem? What’s available to help me figure it out? Or do I need to invent new ways of solving it? This combination of creativity and innovation combined with a sort of fearlessness for tackling the unknown provides you with incredible transferable skills. Fold in being able to connect with, and learn from, terrific colleagues across campus, well you have endless opportunities to transfer skills to other contexts. That’s a fantastic benefit of working here; I don’t think I could have been a genomics professor ‘on the side’ anywhere else in the world.
The fun is the joy of discovery and that chimes with the essence of this University, that ‘Galway Magical Realism’ in the air, which I think is a real thing. I gave a talk in UCD recently to their Master’s in Space Science students on work that I have been doing in Earth Observation, and I could spot the three Galway graduates in the class. In the old days of course, they’d be wearing woolly jumpers… but this time it was on account of the types of questions they asked in the Q&A session after, they had a different take on what I had spoken about, and could immediately see opportunities to take their physics skills and apply them to areas like climate science. That’s a fabulous thing – our graduates are very distinct in their creatively practical approach to their lives. I love finding out what they get up to after they graduate.
How does the University inspire physical science students?
With academics, if you ever want to start up a conversation, you ask: what are you researching? You’ll always get their full attention, as it’s always something they’re passionate about. When we set up research projects for students, we always try to sprinkle on top that enthusiasm, that passion. So when our students work on these cutting-edge problems, they get a sense that they’re part of a wider community, part of the ‘action’. It really enhances their development, both as people and as scientists.
We have a tendency to sell ourselves short a bit here in Ireland. Undergraduate students might go to a public talk, and they’d tell me ‘X was there’, and ‘You know, X wrote the book on exoplanets’ or whatever. And I’d feel like asking them: how would you feel about being X one day? It’s taken as a given, this idea that amazing things only happen somewhere else – at NASA, or somewhere exotic in California instance – but amazing things are happening here too, and more often than not, our students are in the thick of it. This sort of student experience enhances their development as physical scientists – and also as people. That’s part of the value system intrinsic to this University. It’s not something you have on a slogan, but it’s real.
What kind of facilities do we have access to in Ireland? Can you give us a snapshot of those types of interesting projects that our students work on?
I’ve been interested in radio astronomy for my entire career, using telescopes designed to study the Universe in radio ‘light’. If you remember the rabbit ears on those old TVs, when there wasn’t a signal, you saw the black and white fuzz – that’s the ghostly radiation of the Big Bang. What you actually observe there in that static is the billions of years old birth pangs of the Universe.
To do radio astronomy we use aerials as telescopes, except on steroids. So for example, think satellite dishes, except 10s to 100s of metres in diameter weighing thousands of tonnes. Or alternatively, fields full of souped-up rabbit ears, also known as dipole arrays. We’re incredibly fortunate to have one of these operating in Birr, County Offaly. It’s called I-LOFAR (Irish Low-Frequency Array), and it literally looks like, well, a field full of TV aerials… It’s operated by a consortium of Irish universities, with myself in University of Galway and Dr Evan Keane from TCD – another Galway graduate – doing most of the astrophysics research. For five days of the week, it’s connected over fibre-optic cabling with 51 other LOFAR stations throughout Europe, with all of these signals funnelled to a huge supercomputer in Groningen, Holland for processing. For the remaining two days, it’s all ours!
The LOFAR telescope is amazing for motivating students. We drive to Birr, into the grounds of Birr Castle. You go past the Leviathan, which was the largest optical telescope in the world from 1845 to 1917. Around the corner is the I-LOFAR telescope and its nearby Discovery Centre. When we tell students their project is going to be based around using the I-LOFAR radio telescope, they’re hooked. It’s really hands-on, since the telescope was built by astronomers and radio engineers, so the students have to get stuck in the weeds down at the hardware level, understanding computer networks, developing programming skills… not to mention studying the physical Universe! It’s an incredible way to learn so many transferable skills.
I’ll give you two examples of student projects. Former PhD student, Sai Susarla, just finished his doctorate using I-LOFAR. He was studying gravitational waves, predicted to exist from Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and which are in effect ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Sai studied radio pulsars, which are collapsed stars that broadcast precisely pulsed radio beams, and by observing incredibly subtle wobbles present in the radio signals from these cosmic clocks, he could identify the fingerprints of gravitational waves caused by supermassive black holes smashing into each other aeons ago. Sai’s work also had an incredibly practical outcome, as the same radio ‘clocks’ could be used to detect, measure, and study plasma explosions from the Sun – the same events that result in the Northern Lights, when the Earth’s magnetosphere reacts to being ‘hit’ by what’s called a coronal mass ejection. Really bad impacts can be incredibly serious, knocking out satellites and power grids. Studying cosmic gravitational waves… and space weather affecting the Earth, a fantastic demonstration of how Sai’s work could transfer to something with immediate impact.
The second example is a student called Szymon Kozak, who recently graduated with a degree in computer science. I’ve been collaborating with an organisation called the Breakthrough Listen Foundation, set up by billionaire Yuri Milner as part of his Breakthrough Initiatives program. It’s a $100M funded project to search for extraterrestrial ‘technosignatures’ and involves scientists and engineers working at universities and radio observatories around the world. Companies like Nvidia are also heavily involved, as searching for these types of radio signals is an excellent innovation challenge to develop their hardware infrastructure. Szymon was recently selected as part of Breakthrough Listen’s Summer Internship programme to work with me, and he applied his outstanding computer science skills to the problem of being able to use AI to detect the presence of the same signal in two LOFAR telescopes observing the same part of the sky 2000 km apart. This is a very, very hard problem – LOFAR operates at low frequencies (the same frequencies as car radios and electrical appliances) so the background is incredibly noisy, but very local, so you won’t see the same ‘stuff’ when you compare both telescopes’ outputs… But how to separate the ‘stuff’ from something unusual and common to both every millisecond? You need an expert in AI & signal processing for that – like one of our brilliant students, in this case, Szymon.
Physics and data science are becoming increasingly intertwined. In what ways has the University evolved to address this? What about wider applications?
We’re already intertwining disciplines institutionally, certainly in the College of Science and Engineering, where we host three of the University’s institutes: the Ryan Institute, the Institute for Health Discovery and Innovation, and the Data Science Institute. One common denominator to all their work is the analysis and interpretation of empirical data – and that’s where physicists can play a role.
Many people with physics backgrounds are already working in the Institute for Health Discovery and Innovation or the Ryan Institute. One of my current roles is Director of the Centre for Astronomy, and I’m exploring how our centre might affiliate to the Ryan Institute with Director Professor Frances Fahy. Some people might think this is a bit of a stretch, given the Ryan’s focus on the marine and the environment… but the Earth is no different to the many exoplanets my colleagues study when you think about it. Of even greater value is the transferable skills we bring, and there’s a huge opportunity for the Ryan Institute’s research community to avail of our remote sensing expertise particularly in the synthesis and fusing of different types of image data, such as optical and radar data.
Only this November, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched its latest Copernicus mission, Sentinel 1D, an Earth observation satellite that maps the Earth’s surface using radar. This satellite joins an existing constellation that regularly makes both optical and radar observations of our home planet, and there is a lot of interest in trying to combine both image modes, as radar can see through clouds but the ‘things’ it sees aren’t the same things we would immediately recognise in an optical image of the same field of view. ‘Fusing’ an optical image with a radar image for a lot of folks would be a complicated data stitching problem… but for an astrophysicist, it’s pretty straightforward as we’re used to taking images in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and merging them… and then going about decoding what the merged image tells us.
What we now call ‘data science’ is something astronomers and physicists have been doing for over 20 years. To answer our own scientific questions – is there weather on a distant exoplanet, for instance – we have to build the instrument to do the experiments, make the observations, extract all of the data from the observations (usually TBs of it), figure out how to analyse it all using new algorithms and advanced computing infrastructure as usually no one has ever obtained data quite like it before, and then add high-level thinking to the semantic thinking and put scientific shape on what the data is telling us. This approach to solving problems is baked into our students’ training. When they graduate, they are ‘de facto’ data scientists, even if they don’t know it. I remember when I graduated, I thought: I can tell you about Schrodinger’s equation but how’s this going to work in the real world? I didn’t realise at that time that I’d been trained to get to the core of a problem using data: that mindset and ethos to ‘get stuck in’ with whatever tools are to hand is just as important as programming ability for a data scientist.
Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago I was fortunate to win the Science Foundation Ireland Innovator Prize as part of their Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Societal Good Challenge, which involved combining Earth observation data and AI to build models to improve agri-food production in the developing world. It’s difficult to find ‘turnkey’ experts in this area, so I hired an astrophysicist, an expert in solar astronomy, Dr Pearse Murphy, to help us out. Within six months, he had produced a top-quality research paper on analysing radar data taken from the Sentinel earth observation satellites to figure out – from 700 km above! – the soil moisture in several agricultural regions in the central African country of Malawi. It was a bigger challenge for him to understand the effects of surface biomass and soil moisture than to figure out the physics underlying the back-scattered radar signals and cook up the software to do the data analysis, but he did, and just like that he went from being a solar physicist… to a climate scientist!
Where have some notable graduates from the programmes ended up?
Well, they go everywhere and do all kinds of things… For example, Dr Alison Boyle, was recently appointed Director of the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences’s new public health gallery, the first of its kind in Ireland. Another would be Dr Colm Lynch, who is Imaging Operations High Resolution Tech Lead for Planet, the global leader in earth observation satellite innovation. And one of our most recent graduates, Sam O’Neill, went off and founded a technology startup providing high-performance analytics to rowers. For those that have stayed in astronomy and space sciences, some have gone on to work at the very top of their game. These include graduates like Dr Gregg Hallinan, Full Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory at the California Institute of Technology, and Dr Leon Harding, a Senior Staff Engineer and Mission Architect responsible for a whole portfolio of space missions at Northrop Grumman. One of our visiting Erasmus students, Dr Catarina Alves de Oliveira, is currently Head of the Science Operations Development Division at the European Space Agency. I have to include current astrophysics undergraduate Adam Mullins, who has somehow managed to balance his studies with setting up and running the University of Galway Student Pantry, which redistributes surplus food from local supermarkets to the student community; food that would otherwise would be destined for landfill. I am in awe of all of them.
Ireland has a rich astronomical heritage and a growing research infrastructure. How do telescopes, observatories, and international collaborations shape your work, and inspire the next generation of physicists?
The word heritage both refers to the past but also looks to the future. Our ancestors were acutely attuned to the heavens – the great burial complexes and solar observatories along the Boyne Valley, at Newgrange and at Knowth, are testaments to their observational astronomy expertise and also speak to how studying the natural world was intimately part of their cultural lives. I feel very strongly that this urge to explore, to discover, and this deep need to understand through our senses that we do as physicists mirrors the same deep motivations that is the engine for what people think of as ‘culture’ here in Ireland – in the arts, humanities, and literature. An excellent example is the recent discovery of WISPIT 2b, a new planet 437 light years away, which University of Galway astronomer Christian Ginski and his PhD student Chloe Lawlor were involved in. The now former President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins was so inspired by this announcement that he honoured and marked the discovery with the gift of a remarkable work of art to the University, titled ‘Sunburst’. Amazingly creative things happen here in Ireland; we all know that. It seemingly bubbles up from the land itself, creates this incredible vitality… that also inspires the phenomenally creative work that’s happening in STEM here. I think things are particularly special for anyone working in the astronomical sciences. Astronomy speaks to the divine in a sense; anybody who’s looked up on a dark night can feel almost taken out of themselves. That sense of wonder is the real creative engine for us, the thing we go back to when we are stuck in the weeds of working with complex instruments or seemingly impenetrable observational data.
On the subject of the divine, I have to mention the ‘Pope’s Scope’ – this is the nickname given to the 1.8m Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope which is operated by the Vatican Observatory and is located high up in the mountains of Arizona. We – as in University of Galway – have a very specialised camera as what’s known as a ‘Visitor Instrument’ there since 2008. Known as the Galway Ultra Fast Imager or GUFI (of course), when combined with the telescope it’s possible for us to observe all kinds of bizarre and wonderful celestial objects – from brown dwarfs to flare stars, comets and asteroids. How it ended up there is a terrific story of chance and circumstance, but what started out as an experimental ‘spare part’ for Emeritus Professor Chris Dainty’s Applied Optics group was transmogrified into a high-speed imaging camera by our graduate students. I don’t know where I got the idea to cut a deal with the Jesuits to host our camera on their telescope ‘for free’… but it continues to be a wonderful collaboration – most especially for our students who get to travel to the Mount Graham International Observatory outside Tucson to conduct their awe inspiring research, and who get to use the facility cost-free on account of our continuing MoU with the ‘Pope’s Scope’!
Modern astronomy needs big telescopes – period – and for that we need large mirrors, to soak up as much of that faint ghostly light from the deepest recesses of the cosmos and to focus it all down onto a detector maybe the size of a smartphone. It’s probably the best kept secret on campus that University of Galway is part of the select few consortia currently building the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) on a top-sliced mountain top high up in the Chilean Andes. The ELT, when it becomes operational in 2029, will be the biggest telescope ever built, with a mirror 40-metres in size, held within a building the size of the Aviva Stadium. This will be nothing less than a ‘discovery machine’, and due to our University’s involvement, we’ll have guaranteed time on the telescope, to be a part of the discoveries of the century… that is such an exciting prospect!
My colleague here in Physics, Dr Nicholas Devaney, leads our University’s team in building the ‘applied optics’ instrument for the ELT, known as MORFEO, as part of a wider European consortium involving research institutes in Italy, France and Canada. MORFEO will be the size of a small detached house, and it will use advanced optics to in real-time remove the atmospheric turbulence that makes stars twinkle – pretty for us on a clear night, a disaster if you want to obtain the crispest images from deep space. Galway was explicitly invited to join the MORFEO consortium on account of our long tradition of applied optics excellence, with amazingly successful spin-out companies like MBRYONICS and FotoNation all having their origin in Emeritus Professor Chris Dainty’s Applied Optics Research Group.
How does creativity drive learning, discovery, and research across the physics community? What does that look like at the University?
Recently I had a tour of the Croker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California Davis, just outside Sacramento, where they operate a cyclotron (basically a particle accelerator in cylinder surrounded by powerful magnets) for nuclear physics research. There was a small, boxed room in this big industrial lab space whose door opened up into a bright, comfortable space in which was a chair, a head mask and a tube going all the way back to the cyclotron. I found out that this was where proton beams were diverted to treat patients with uveal melanoma, a rare cancer of the eye. Medical Physics is one of my other interests, and it’s a fascinating and incredibly important problem to try to figure out the best way to optimise a given patient’s radiotherapy treatment. You need to use particle codes developed originally by astronomers and particle physicists to understand how beams of radiation interact with matter. It may sound crazy but from a physics point of view, it’s not a million miles away from studying the effects of particle beams slamming into a planet’s atmosphere… and I’ve already seen that movie. Back in 2007 graduate student Gregg Hallinan led a study which detected for the first time aurora – what we’d call the Northern Lights – around another world, a brown dwarf some 35 light years from us. The underlying auroral currents that make the light show we observe are actually incredibly powerful electrical processes, creating very high-energy particle beams that are so powerful above these brown dwarfs that they actually result in measurable atmospheric effects. Having worked on that kind of problem, I immediately saw the connection with a proton beam going into a patient’s eye and have started thinking about coming up with new ways to make such treatments more effective. I think this a great example of how physicists can seemingly move from one completely different area to another, mainly because we can see the same basic physical processes common to both.
Our students have this unique opportunity to build capacity in transferable skills, through taking problems from astronomy and applying them in other contexts, particularly in the medical field, an area that complements the strong health sciences mission of the University. This connection with medical applications isn’t accidental. University of Galway was the first to set up a clinically accredited MSc in Medical Physics degree programme – our graduate qualification is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Physics Education Programs, which means they can practise in a clinical setting. I’m constantly thinking how to take what works in astrophysics and apply it in ways we can give back, apart from sharing the wonder of what we do as astronomers. It’s this mindset that keeps me grounded.
